


there's always something left to lose

by naheka



Category: Fear the Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Magical Realism, Multi, Pre-OT3, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-05
Updated: 2017-06-05
Packaged: 2018-11-09 06:12:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11098575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/naheka/pseuds/naheka
Summary: Chris felt the world die.





	there's always something left to lose

**Author's Note:**

> Posted for archiving purposes.

Chris felt the world die. It happened more slowly than everyone seems to remember it. Just like that they all say, the survivors speaking wistfully at dawn and at dusk and huddled around water pipes and the low burning fires. One day everything the same, and the next…

But Chris felt the world die, minute by minute. It started soft, like a clock slowing down. The life leeched from the trees and the grass, crawling away from the dark, and the sun brightened, day after day.

Alicia caught him applying sunscreen and teased him, relentless. Touched his dark cheek with her softgloss lips and laid her arm next to him before leaning into his side. He curled his hand around her shoulder and held her close. A sunray reached for her fair skin and he curled his lip at it until it slid away.

++

Nick finds him vomiting weakly into the toilet, clammy hands sliding in cold sweats on the porcelain bowl. “Hey ho, sicko.” He hauls him upright, and Chris retches, weakly. “Gross,” Nick mutters, stepping back.

Chris thinks he’s gone, until hands gently grasp his sides and hold him firm. A cold damp towel touches the back of his neck and he moans, pathetic. He mumbles, unintelligble, and Nick shushes him.

After a while he manages to sit up under his own power. When he speaks his voice rasps, escaping in grey smoke bubbles. “Thank you.”

Nick's veins crawl like spiderwebs, lighting up black where the dope clogs him up and kills him slow. “I know how it goes, baby brother.” Nick carries him to bed and smoothes his hair off his face. The sun burrows into Nick’s chest like it was born there.

++

Chris feels the world snap. He’s in someone’s suit jacket and Alicia glimmers in that dress like she was born for silk and pearls. She tastes like stale coffee and the colour yellow, and when she breathes his name the letters float out in champagne bubbles. When he kisses her he feels reality snap, and he can hear the sun laughing from the other side of the world.

They walk back to their house with their hands linked. There’s a curl of pearls in his front pocket she doesn’t know about, because they looked so good dipping into the curves of her collarbone, and she kisses him once more before they part for bed.

++

Nick huddles into the sleeping bag. He feels sluggish during the night, like a battery waiting to be plugged back in. The walkers sleep in the dark; like true monsters they walk under the sun and so does he.

Alicia shuffles over, that big blue blanket heavy on her shoulders, and when she looks at him guarded and unhappy he can’t help but pull her close and nose under her ear. Her pulse thumps against his cheek and he can feel his heart creak to life in his chest, his blood singing to flutter warm against her skin again.

“You’re right,” she says, snuggling into his body with a soft noise. “I’ve never seen the stars so bright.”

He’s clean and he’s here and she’s smiling at him, and it’s the easiest thing in the world to reach up into the sky and pluck a star from the endless patterns. He puts it on the tip of her tongue and when she swallows he sees its glow flow from her jaw down her throat. He unbuttons her shirt and kisses her skin, following it down into her belly. He blows a raspberry just above her hipbone and she hooks a leg over his. He falls asleep with the star burning against his palm, his hand spanning almost the entirety of her waist.

++

When Chris dies Alicia loses colour. It fades from the world in seconds, starting at the edges of her vision, that blue blue cloudless sky, and ending with the chipped polish on her nails. She doesn’t realize it must have been the same time until Travis staggers to them and chokes out the truth. She leaves him to cry into her mother’s arms and leans into a chainlink fence, the metal rusted and sagging under her weight.

She looks out at the world and sees nothing but grey, blurring together and making it hard to distinguish shapes and people. She trips over things for two days until she recalibrates her depth perception.

A week later and she’s by a fire, staring blankly into the dancing sparks. Her life feels like an old movie. Sometimes she hears piano music instead of her mother’s voice. She thinks of Chris and for a second, just one beat of her heart, she sees all the shades of the flame: red and yellow and orange. She closes her eyes and when she opens them again she’s back in chrome.

++

Heroin, Nick thinks, feels like the colour blue. He did coke once, in high school, and that was all red, fire in his veins and the pitter patter of his heartbeat ramping up. Meth was neon signs and police sirens, jittering his muscles and jangling his mind. Opiates are blue. They wash over him like the tides, rising and ebbing and swelling and pulling him under with the cold refreshing splash of it. Drowning isn’t so bad when it curls around him like a friend and sings siren songs while it steals the breath from his lungs.

The sun bakes him red and Alicia clucks to see it. She finds an aloe plant by the road and makes him sit still to rub its gel across his cheekbones and behind his ears. The sun snarls at her, to steal him from it, and when he fucks her that night he keeps his hands around her throat until it bruises just that shade of blue, to show his claim.

Everything fades and sometimes he dreams of being high like the first plunge into a pool during a heatwave. He misses it like a junkie, and sometimes the only reason he walks is because when Alicia says his name it slips out cerulean.

++

Chris wakes up on the moon. When he screams nothing happens. He sits in a crater and cries until his tears freeze on his cheeks. The dust leaves his skin chalky white and with every step he takes he bounds. He runs until he can’t anymore and then sits with his knees pulled to his chest. He waits for his mother to come and she never does.

++

When Nick tries to leave her Alicia presses one palm to the lowest swell of her belly and whispers for it to help her. The star leaps from her throat and rattles against her fingers and she follows its jumps until she finds him again. She worries he’ll take it from her and she hides it under her tongue.

“Mine,” she says, and presses him against the dust of the old world, riding him until he cries out her name and it echoes off the rubble.

++

Chris stands on the edge of the moon and peers out at the blue white swirl of his old life. The world is dead and he can feel it saying its last words, creaky and tired. He takes a step off the edge and falls, his hair fluttering. He keeps his eyes open until the wind forces them shut.

++

Nick thinks Alicia is dying. Her skin has gone translucent and he can see her bones, thin and bird hollow. They creak every time she stands.

++

Alicia sees a blade of grass from the corner of her eye. It’s crabgrass, a weed, peeking up from the cracked remnants of an old sidewalk, and it’s the brightest clearest green she’s ever seen. She falls to her knees beside it, and when she plucks it, gentle, it goes grey in her fingers and she hurls it aside, furious–it lands next to a flower, wilted but delicately flushed with white pink petals.

She follows them. Sometimes she hits a highway and has to bend to search for weeds or for moss or even mold, but it’s there and it’s a trail. She walks until her legs ache and there’s old blood across her wrists. Nick finds her two days later and she collapses into his arms, sleeping for twelve straight hours while he drips water into her mouth from a cloth and coaxes her into swallowing a package of old crackers. When he fucks her gentle the next night she sobs Chris’s name and he kisses her too soft in response.

They keep walking. The night Nick cradles her against his chest and fingers her roughly and promises he won’t leave her again, her colours come all the way back like a switch flick. She comes harder than she ever has and when she twitches, dazed, she can see the colour in Nick’s eyes again. “He’s close,” she says. Nick holds her hand tight.

++

Alicia finds Chris under the shade of a sycamore tree. There are roots around his ankles and when she cuts them away they hiss like snakes. Nick helps her pull him clear and carries him until they find a place to hide for a few days. Chris’s breathing rattles in his chest and his eyelids flutter when they call his name. They sleep on either side of him with their hands clasped above his empty chest, his heart silent under their palms.

++

Chris is having an out of body experience. He sits crosslegged over his own body and contemplates going back to sleep. Nick looks healthy, he thinks. All the black flushed out of his veins and thrumming red-strong. Alicia is too thin. She slurs when she speaks and Nick can’t get her to keep anything more than water down. Nick sits by their bedsides and promises out-loud to kill himself if he loses them.

Chris kisses the center of her breastbone and scalds his lips red and raw. She’s lit up from within with holy fire; it’s burning her from the inside out.

++

When night falls and Nick reaches into Alicia’s chest, he means to stop the beating of her heart in his fist and crush her to dust. He’ll scatter her on the morning breeze and save a spoonful for himself; swallow her with the last of the water and die with her heavy on his tongue. But his fingers touch something hard and razor edged–when he pulls the star from where it was hiding in the basket of her ribs his palm is bleeding from a dozen cuts.

Thorns grow between his fingers when he cracks it in half, and he can hear his fingers break when he slips one half back into her, one half into Chris. Alicia opens her eyes just as Chris inhales again.

++

They wait for three days before moving. Chris wraps Nick’s fingers up and Alicia feeds him. On the fourth day, Chris and Alicia stumble on fawn legs and squint against the bright of the sun–Nick shivers once and stands taller than he has in years, cracking his neck and opening his eyes wide. He looks directly into the sun and holds them both steady for the long journey home.

**Author's Note:**

> let me know what you think :)


End file.
